Although all the focus and intellectual effort of many organisations is to build a new system to overcome some business problem or need, they sometime forget the equally large support costs. “Spending on operations usually takes up over half the total IT budget, with much of the money going on support and maintenance” (Gartner 23rd December 2003).

If you are not ready to move your development projects offshore, you can certainly move to the application support service.
For many organisations, once an application has been completed, the original development personnel are released on to new projects. In fact, often as the application enters the testing phase, the development team is gradually reduced. Application support in the west is often not seen as “sexy” and staff retention rate for those handling this role is low. This is not true for our offshore developers. They are grateful to be working on systems that have been produced in the west and enjoy improving them.

The first line of call for a customer support query can either be on the customer’s site or at one of our affiliated offshore call-centres. The main difference is cost. If on-site either the customer or IQ Software operates an internal help desk. For offshore support the telephone number that the customer calls is typically a local number (for example 0870 or 0845 prefixed in the UK).
We maintain a team of offshore support analysts and developers to handle second and third line support. Depending on the size and scale of the application we can maintain a permanent team dedicated for the support contract.

Typically, if IQ Software’s Application Maintenance service is also used there is an overall cost reduction. The start-up cost and training time required for the support analysts is reduced.